Tea at Trianon: St. Augustine and J.R.R. Tolkien

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, November 19, 2022

St. Augustine and J.R.R. Tolkien

From The Imaginative Conservative:

Like many Englishmen, he feared a world divided in two, in which the smaller peoples would be swallowed. Only fifteen years earlier, in reaction to the Teheran Conference, Tolkien had written: “I heard of that bloodthirsty old murderer Josef Stalin inviting all nations to join a happy family of folks devoted to the abolition of tyranny and intolerance!” One would be blind to miss Tolkien’s disgust. “I wonder (if we survive this war) if there will be any niche, even of sufferance, left for reactionary back numbers like me (and you). The bigger things get the smaller and duller or flatter the globe gets. It is getting to be one blasted little provincial suburb.” Soon, he feared, America would spread its “sanitation, morale-pep, feminism, and mass production” throughout the world.[3] Neither “ism”—corporate consumer capitalism or communism, both radical forms of materialism—seemed particularly attractive to Tolkien, a man who loved England (but not Great Britain!) and who loved monarchy according to medieval conventions, while hating statism in any form.

Indeed, as with St. Augustine as the barbarians tore through Rome’s gate on August 24, 410, at midnight, Tolkien looked out over a ruined world: a world on one side controlled by ideologues, and, consequently, a world of the Gulag, the Holocaust camps, the Killing fields, and total war; on the other: a world of the pleasures of the flesh, Ad-Men, and the democratic conditioners to be found, especially, in bureaucracies and institutions of education. Both east and west had become dogmatically materialist, though in radically different fashions. In almost all ways, the devastation of Tolkien’s twentieth-century world was far greater than that of St. Augustine’s fifth-century world. At least barbarian man believed in something greater than himself. One could confront him as a man, a man who knew who he was and what he believed, however false that belief might be. “I sometimes wonder,” C.S. Lewis once mused, “whether we shall not have to re-convert men to real Paganism as a preliminary to converting them to Christianity.”[4] Twentieth-century man, led by fanatic ideologies, used state-sponsored terror to murder nearly 200 million persons outside of war. War in the same century claimed another 38.5 million persons.[5] Simply put, the blood ran frequently and deeply between 1914 and Tolkien’s death in 1973.

Despite the fifteen centuries separating the lives of the two men, Tolkien’s own world view closely paralleled that of St. Augustine’s, and the attentive reader finds much in common between the City of God and Tolkien’s larger mythology of Middle-earth. Tolkien would have received his understanding of St. Augustine from his boyhood upbringing in the Birmingham Oratory, founded by the most famous nineteenth-century convert to Roman Catholicism, John Henry Newman. After Tolkien’s mother passed away in 1904, Father Francis Morgan, a priest of the Oratory and friend of Newman’s, became Tolkien’s legal guardian.[6] Certainly, St. Augustine had influenced Newman in a number of ways. In his Apologia, for example, Newman admitted that “the main Catholic doctrine of the warfare between the City of God and the powers of darkness had been deeply imposed upon” him. To Newman, nineteenth-century liberalism and philosophic utilitarianism were the harbingers of a secular, modern City of Man, and God would not stay his wrath. “A confederacy of evil, marshalling its hosts from all parts of the world, organizing itself, taking its measures, enclosing the Church of Christ as in a net, [was] preparing the way for a general Apostacy from it,” Newman feared in 1838.[7] Though the Cardinal never lived to see his fears realized, Tolkien did. Tolkien even experienced the horrors of modernity first hand in the trenches at the Somme. (Read more.)